Cook Rose

Isabel Wilkerson's voice

 

In the cold ledgers of Bryan plantation, I am but a shadow named Rose, my worth scratched in ink at a mere $150. It is a number that holds no measure of the heart beating within me or the memories I carry, a cipher that cannot capture the weight of my soul.

Yet as dawn’s first light spills over the Georgia pines, I kneel by the cookfire, my hands shaping cornmeal into hoe cakes. The flames sear my skin, their heat a fierce reminder of the world’s unyielding demands. A song rises in my throat, its notes stitched into my being by my mother, she'd carried across an ocean’s vast and merciless expanse.

When Master James brought me here in 1832, the year he raised his grand house, this land was still raw, its earth scarred where great trees fell for cotton’s relentless claim. That song, faint but heavy with meaning, is my inheritance. It is a tether to a home I know only in dreams, a place my bones remember though my eyes have never seen.

In the tender hush of morning, overseer Jacob Rhoder’s lantern sways like a restless beacon, cutting through the mist as he strides from the big house. His voice slices the dawn’s peace: “Supplies run low, and the cotton must reach Macon!” Moses and Hagi hurry to the stables, their hands swift, hitching mules to wagons. The clatter of wood and hoof shatters the stillness, the air thick with dust and the sharp tang of leather.

I turn to my fire, the hoe cakes sizzling, their edges crisping like the bitter coffee we share in silence. After breakfast, Red gathers shovels and axes, leading a weary band to Bear Branch, where last week’s flood broke the dam. Its waters churn like the unspoken grief in our souls.

George marshals thirty of us to the fields, where hoes rise and fall under the sun’s unblinking gaze. The earth yields to our sweat, as if it knows our labor is its lifeblood. In the quarters, seamstresses’ fingers weave homespun and calico, stitching necessity into cloth. Others spin thread or cradle the young ones.

My arms, once strong enough to lift a quarter hog, now falter. Young Caroline, fleet and sure, slips to the smokehouse, her steps a quiet rhythm as we prepare the evening meal. When the dinner bell tolls, its iron cry rolls across the fields. We gather, bodies worn but hunger sharp, the salted ham and molasses a brief solace.

Red does not linger, his feet carrying him to the kiln, where he stokes the fire fierce, turning wood to coal for the rare glint of coin. Bob and Jake labor there too, their axes and adzes biting into logs until nightfall. Each swing is a step toward a dollar’s fleeting promise, the air humming with their toil, the scent of charred wood mingling with the earth’s damp breath.

Word comes that Master’s sons, Hugh and Cornelius, set out at dawn, their wagons heavy with cotton, wheels grinding through the red dust of the Macon Road. By dusk, they camped at the Toby Sofky toll bridge, under a sky scattered with stars like seeds cast wide.

The next day, they reached T.A. Harris’s warehouse on Macon’s Cotton Avenue, the Ocmulgee’s waters murmuring at the banks. Eight bales, 4,015 pounds, brought $402 after fees, a fortune born of our hands, our sweat, our lives. That cotton, they say, travels by steamboat to Savannah, then north, where traders—men who weigh souls as lightly as goods—send it across the sea, as they once did my mother.

The brothers returned with wagons laden—flour, salt, whiskey in abundance, and shoes for us, a small shield against the earth’s hard edges. Come Sunday, some of us walk to Sand Ridge Church, where the Holy Spirit stirs, a fleeting warmth shared by masters and enslaved alike. Others remain in the quarters, sipping spirits of another kind, living as free as the master’s leash allows. It is our day to breathe, to laugh, to steal a moment’s ease, though Monday’s toil waits, patient and unyielding.

As the moon rises, silvering the pines, I sit outside my cabin, the night’s cool touch a balm against my skin. I hum my mother’s song, its cadence steady in my memory, unbroken by time. The child within me stirs, cradled in a peace no ledger can erase, a fragment of a far-off home, carried across oceans, still whole in my heart.